Bush Proposes Line-Item Veto - New York TimesBush Proposes Line-Item Veto - New 
York Times 
 
 
 
 
 
March 6, 2006
Bush Proposes Line-Item Veto 
By JOHN O'NEIL
President Bush today proposed legislation to create a line-item veto, a measure 
he said would help restrain government spending by allowing him to strip out 
pork-barrel spending. 
Congress passed a line-item veto in 1996, but two years later, the Supreme Court 

ruled 6 to 3 that it represented an unconstitutional intrusion into powers 
granted exclusively to the legislative branch. Mr. Bush said his new bill was 
drafted in a way that would avoid the court's objections. 
An administration official later said that the new bill would send vetoed items 
back to Congress, which could then reinstate them by majority vote, rather than 
the traditional two-thirds margin, as the 1996 bill had required. 
Mr. Bush today cast the proposal, which he has favored since his first 
presidential campaign in 2000, in terms of its ability to help hold down money 
spent by "earmarks"  spending inserted into larger bills by individual members 
of Congress, usually for projects that benefit their home districts. The total 
amount spent by earmarking has soared in recent years, leading to a new effort 
in the Senate to rein them in, which Mr. Bush said today he supported. 
The biggest obstacle to members of Congress cutting spending is the fear that 
they would lose their own items, Mr. Bush said, speaking at a White House 
ceremony for the swearing in of Edward P. Lazear as the new chairman of the 
Council of Economic Advisers. "Everybody thinks their spending idea is a great 
idea," he said. 
Earmarks compound the problem, he said.
"Congress can slip spending provisions into large bills where they never debated 

and never get discussed," said Mr. Bush. "As a result, too many bills passed by 
Congress include unneeded spending that reflects special interests instead of 
the people's interest." 
He noted that 43 governors have the right to cast line-item vetoes. "Now it's 
time to bring this important tool of fiscal discipline to Washington, D.C.," Mr. 

Bush said. 
The bill passed in 1996 gave the president the right to veto individual items in 

bills on spending or tax breaks. It had been proposed as part of the 
Republicans' 1994 "Contract With America," but it attracted the votes of 69 
senators and more than 290 members of the House. 
President Clinton used the veto to block 82 items, including money for New York 
City hospitals and a tax break for Idaho potato growers, from 11 laws. One batch 

of line-item vetoes, for 38 military construction projects, was overridden by 
Congress. 
Then, in 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that the line-item vetoes amounted to 
amendments to the laws the items were contained in, and thus trespassed on the 
power to enact legislation that the Constitution granted exclusively to 
Congress. 
Mr. Bush said today that his new plan avoided that problem.
"Today, I'm sending Congress legislation that will meet standards and give me 
the authority to strip special spending and earmarks out of a bill, and then 
send them back to Congress for an up or down vote," he said. 
Even though only a majority vote would be needed to override, members of 
Congress might find it more difficult to vote for questionable items once they 
stood by themselves instead of lying buried in the depths of larger legislation. 

 
But it is not clear from the earlier Supreme Court decision just how much extra 
authority over budgeting the justices are willing to allow a president to have 
regardless of the threshold for an override. 
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, in a concurring decision, had seemed to object to 
the broader notion of rewriting the legislative process to concentrate more 
power in the hands of the president. "Liberty is always at stake when one or 
more of the branches seek to transgress the separation of powers," he wrote. 
Writing for the minority, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that "there is not a 
nickel's worth of difference" between giving the president the authority to 
cancel an individual item and allowing him to spend money on a particular item 
at his discretion. 
The more immediate hurdle Mr. Bush's proposal faces is in Congress, where the 
idea has not been a priority even for the many members who had previously 
supported it. Democrats also seem less likely to support the plan if it would 
mean giving more power to Mr. Bush. 
Jim Manley, a spokesman for Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, said 

that Mr. Reid would vote against the idea, as he had in 1996. 
"Senator Reid is opposed to the line-item veto in part because it takes away 
powers granted to Congress, and because of the impact it could have on smaller 
states like Nevada," Mr. Manley said. 
 
 
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